Discussion: A Critical Appreciation

First I want to thank Dr Jackson for a most interesting and thought-provoking contribution.

The paper is divided into two parts, (1) theoretical and (2) clinical, corresponding to the teaching of the alchemists that their opus consisted of two parts, practica and theoria. Following the procedure customary for modern scientific papers, Dr Jackson discusses these two aspects in the reverse order, but his thesis agrees with the alchemical endeavour in an important respect, for the alchemists were concerned with a process of transformation—the transformation of the ignoble into the noble, of the material into the non-material. This was, indeed, the innermost secret and goal of their art. Over and over again the texts admonish the worker to “deprive the substance of its body and work on its shadow”, that is, they must find the insubstantial content of the materia. And in analytic practice, too, the transformation from a merely materially oriented consciousness into a psychological or spiritual one is the very nub of our endeavour.

In discussing Dr Jackson's paper I propose to take the clinical side first, for his cases illustrate this thesis in a very pertinent way. I think we have probably all met patients who are in the very infantile or primitive state of consciousness that he describes—whatever the reason for such an undeveloped or regressed state may be. These are the patients who project somatic images into objects. This was the case with Dr Jackson's patient who equated a cigar with his erect penis, albeit unconsciously, and reacted to it emotionally as he did to his own organ. Or to take the other illustrations he gives of the woman who experienced the coldness of her own nature as physical coldness; or of the child who has the same emotions in regard to the mud he is playing with—an allowable activity—as he formerly had in regard to the faeces he is not allowed to play with. And I think we all agree that when such an individual comes to analysis the mechanism is t